Posts made in March, 2014

Many critical facilities have emergency diesel generators that are used for back-up power. These generators need to be ready to supply power when the normal source of power is no longer available. To ensure that they are able to do the job as intended, we test them periodically. While some uses are mandated by law as to how often and how they are tested, many locations do not fall under these tight restrictions and, more often than not, other factors such as cost or air-pollution limitations dictate these parameters. When it comes to testing your site’s emergency diesel generators, do you periodically run them loaded or unloaded, or both? What is the “best” method in your opinion, and why? Please share your experiences and best practices with everyone in the comments section below! (Editor’s Note: Comments will be moderated and posted as quickly as...

A number of articles discuss raising the temperature of data center spaces in order to save cost. In many situations, very significant cost savings can be had by doing this – but raising the temperature is only a part of the picture. The act of raising temperature in any space means that the space simply has an overall increase of the enthalpy or total energy. This act by itself does nothing for the thermodynamics of the system. From a data-center-space perspective, regardless of the temperature, the heat energy generated by the servers and equipment must be transported or expelled from the area. It is in this process that you can either make the system efficient or not. Consider the following diagram: In this conventional design, it doesn’t matter what temperature the data center is held at, there still needs to be 100KW of heat removed. This moving of heat energy costs energy. If we have a centrifugal chiller, it takes about 0.6 KW per ton to remove this heat. So if we use this example:...